The Latino Appreciation Student Organization (LASO) is a student ran club that focuses on educating the community about Latino culture and life at WCU.
In order to educate the students, LASO has held several programs that focus on various identities within the Latino community.
These programs look at the differences between the 20-21 nationalities that make up the Latinx community.
For example, one of the programs addressed African heritage in Latin America. Up until recently, the Mexican government didn’t include a box labeled Afro-Mexican for citizens to check off when identifying their nationality.
Once that box was created, Mexico went from not recognizing anyone as Afro-Mexican to having about 1.4 million people identify as Afro-Mexican.
LASO’s academic advisor, Ricardo Nazario-Colón, is proud of LASO’s work and what they are doing for WCU’s community.
“It goes back to how can we be better at this thing that we do for 70 to 80 to 90 years called humanity right,” said Nazario-Colón. “How can we make that better? I think that in a sense LASO is contributing a little bit in their own sphere to making us better.”
Since LASO represents a minority here on campus, we wanted to include them in our podcast series.
If you or anyone you know has faced discrimination or bias here on campus, you can report it online through the complaints and concerns website page or contact student affairs at (828) 227-7147.
If you would like to share your story, you can contact WCJ’s advisor at kspasovska@email.wcu.edu.
Click below to listen to our episode on LASO.
Audio edited by Garret Readling
